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Monster Pains: Masochism, Menstruation, and Identification in the Horror Film
Abstract
Aviva Briefel examines the ways in which the horror film's gendering of the monster's pain affects audience identification. Male monsters in these films are associated with acts of masochism that allow for a comfortable spectatorial distance. In contrast, female monsters precede their sadistic rampages with moments of menstruation, which claustrophobically draw their audiences to them.
... This satirical, self-referential film reflects and refracts ideas about crime and punishment including a critical viewpoint on mass incarceration in America while critiquing a culture of institutional violence in Western society. The human centipede is monstrous, and HC3 could be viewed within the monster horror subgenre (Briefel, 2005). Monsters are metaphorical, as they reveal something about the societies we live in and what is valued (Briefel, 2005;Peck, 2014). ...
... The human centipede is monstrous, and HC3 could be viewed within the monster horror subgenre (Briefel, 2005). Monsters are metaphorical, as they reveal something about the societies we live in and what is valued (Briefel, 2005;Peck, 2014). Consequently, HC3 has much to reveal about American society. ...
... Alongside growing criminological interest in literal and metaphorical monsters, ghosts, zombies and horror film (e.g. Briefel, 2005;DeKeseredy et al., 2014;Fiddler, 2019;Linnemann and Wall, 2014;Peck, 2014) we demonstrate that the body horror film genre holds vast potential for critique by critical and cultural criminologists who seek to interrogate the horrors of state violence, crime, and fascism. Rafter's (2006Rafter's ( , 2007 pioneering work on crime film and popular criminology set the tone for cultural criminological inquiry into film and the representation of crime and punishment. ...
We analyze the 2015 horror film Human Centipede III: Final Sequence (HC3), written and directed by Dutch filmmaker Tom Six. Engaging with literature on torture porn and body horror, we argue that this film reflects and refracts ideas about crime and punishment including a critical view on mass incarceration in America while critiquing a culture of institutional violence in Western society. By critiquing the institutional violence of the prison in a satirical and visceral manner, we argue Tom Six evades dominant tropes (liberalism, reform, rehabilitation, and escape) prevalent in other prison films and avoids the cinematic tendency to naturalize and reproduce the legitimacy of the prison. We also contend that the film operates at a meta-level to address criticism about the dangers of graphic violence in horror films. HC3 thus offers insight on the disingenuous nature of censorship in a society that condones mass suffering behind bars, systemic racism, and institutionalized punishment of the body for millions.
... The horror genre has been criticized for desensitizing viewers to violence, encouraging a sort of perverse fascination with human suffering. However, the heinous acts committed by killers and monsters prevent us from identifying with them, and allow us to instead identify with the victims of the suffering (Briefel, 2005). In this fashion, our emotional responses become synchronized with the emotional responses of horror cinema's victims (Carroll, 1987). ...
... Various horror films encourage our identification with the protagonist/s (possibly later victim/s) but a familiar convention in the horror film is a POV shot from the killer's perspective (Cherry, 2009). Cherry relates this to Mulvey's theory but it has perhaps more in common with Manlove's reversal of the gaze-the killer's POV may be so shocking that the viewer is forced out of any feeling of identification with them from the initial POV shot, a feeling intended to be associated with every subsequent POV shot (Briefel, 2005;Cherry, 2009;Manlove, 2007). ...
Purpose
This paper explores the manner in which modern horror films present stigmatizing depictions of psychosis and mental health care environments.
Conclusions
Horror films will often include stigmatizing representations of psychosis and mental health care environments. Cinematic techniques can create stigmatizing depictions of psychosis and mental health care environments. Misinformation is often communicated. Due to these stigmatizing representations, people experiencing mental ill health may be rejected by the public.
Practice implications
Stigma is a serious problem affecting the mental health services. It is important for practitioners to understand where stigma arises in order to challenge beliefs and attitudes.
... Such depictions depict our women's bodies as somehow weakened in their cycles, even as our men's bodies remain "ordinary" (Chrisler et al., 2006;Cosgrove and Caplan, 2004;Nicolson, 1995;Offman and Kleinplatz, 2004) {13}. films that often portray menstruation as disgusting (e.g., Superbad (Motmonthlyla, 2007)), {14} using monthly menstruation to depict horror and disgust (Briefel, 2005;Kissling, 2002).{15} these depictions collect girls' bodies as dirty, disgusting and in need of disinfection, deodorization, medication, handling, exfoliation and denudation (Kissling, 2006). ...
In tandem with cultural taboos about menstruation, girls have traditionally posited ambivalent relationships between their bodies, sexuality, and menstrual cycles.{1} From the historic menstrual hut to the modern invention of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) to the pervasive social norm of eliciting female menstruation from others (Delaney et al., 1988) menstruation was categorized as distasteful, socially deviant, and in some cases pathological. similarly, the contemporary lady regularly revels in shameful approximately our bodies in the context of sex, citing body photo issues, sexual "disorder," and matters we experience approximately every day as key sexual issues (Kleinplatz, 2001; Nobre and Pinto-Gouveia, 2008; Plante, 2006; Tiefer, 2001)1. girls routinely engage in a range of normative body practices to manage their 'disgusting' bodies (Roberts and Goldenberg, 2007) {2}: hiding menstruation, shaving (Tiggemann and Lewis, 2004) {3}, sports make-up, weight control, hiding body parts odors and extensive care. while several studies have looked at women's feelings, sensations, and responses to menstruation—especially negativity toward menstruation—relatively little research has examined how these cultural interpretations of menstruation fueled women's sex lives.
... The abovementioned themes seem to mirror various characteristics of femininity and female monstrosity in horror fiction as discussed by scholars interested in the gender-related imageries within the genre (i.e. Briefel 2005, Creed 1986, Williams 1991. Two typical themes concerning the depiction of women in horror stories are being distinguished and emphasized in those stances-the deviation of femininity and victimization. ...
... Advertisers selling disposable menstrual products depict menstruation as unclean, dirty, gross, and unfeminine to market panty liners, pads, and tampons (with notably blue liquid instead of red liquid on TV ads) (Berg and Coutts 1994;Kissling 2006). Films that portray menstruation overwhelmingly depict the horrors of menstrual leaks, coming-of-age stories filled with shame and embarrassment, and outright menstrual negativity in comedy acts (Briefel 2005;Kissling 2002;Rosewarne 2012). In prisons, where women are routinely denied access to "feminine hygiene" products and drugs for menstrual pain, there are countless instances of misogynist slurs being used by guards against women who bleed through their clothing after not being provided with proper products (Marusic 2016). ...
... Historically, women learned to see menstruation as taboo and as something in need of management (Delaney, Lupton, & Toth, 1988); in various cultures and times, menstrual blood has signified disease, corruption, social violations (Read, 2008;Shuttle & Redgrove, 1988), failed reproduction (Kerkham, 2003;Martin, 2001), and disability (Kissling, 2006). Women face an onslaught of negative imagery about menstruation, as the media imply that menstruation makes women "unclean" (Briefel, 2005;Kissling, 2006;Rosewarne, 2012), and the medicalization of menstruation has resulted in women seeing their menstrual cycles as inconvenient, unnecessary, something to medicate away, and, in the worst cases, something that causes mental illness (Johnston-Robledo, Barnack, & Wares, 2006;Rose, Chrisler, & Couture, 2008). Advertisers routinely depict women's menstruating bodies as unfeminine, dirty, tainted, and disgusting in order to sell pads, panty liners, and tampons to consumers (Berg & Coutts, 1994;Davidson, 2012;Kissling, 2006). ...
Though researchers have hotly debated the phenomenon of menstrual synchrony—women menstruating in tandem when living in close quarters with one another—no conclusive evidence has proven or disproven its existence. In this theoretical article, we draw from sociological theories of collective identities, psychological research on menstrual synchrony, and relevant literatures on menstrual activism and sisterhood to examine the frequent occurrence of women's belief in menstrual synchrony despite the lack of evidence that this phenomenon actually occurs. We propose a theoretical explanation for women's beliefs in menstrual synchrony by arguing that these beliefs serve several functions that enhance gender solidarity: (a) reduction of shame and taboo related to menstruation; (b) a socially acceptable way of constructing modern “sisterhood”; (c) a method for marking women's relationship to nature; and (d) a pathway to fight back against sexism and sexist assumptions about menstruation and menstruating women. We argue that women's belief in menstrual solidarity has blocked efforts to debunk “myths” associated with menstrual synchrony, as women continue to validate, perpetuate, and endorse their menstrual solidarity with other women in a culture that largely devalues both menstruation and women's social bonds.
... When associated with middle-class values, "lycanthropy posed a threat from within the normative social collectivity, it tended to be formulated as an interiorized invisible presence, emanating from the psyche" (du Coudray, 2002, p. 9). While it is assumed to be natural for monsters to be male because of masochistic desires tied to constructions of hegemonic masculinity, Aviva Briefel (2005) notes that female werewolves are depicted in film as tending, "to commit acts of violence out of revenge for earlier abuse by parents, partners, rapists, and other offenders" (p. 20). ...
This article centers the experiences of women of color in academia by placing my narrative alongside literature about shapeshifters/werewolves and racism and sexism in the academy. I use my narratives as a queer feminist of color in the academy to draw parallels between these experiences to explicate how women of color are constructed as monstrous Others. Through the performative rendering and naming of this parallel or metaphor the author hopes to evocatively implicate and draw readers into action or spaces of resistance.
... For many critics writing around the time of the films" releases, the gender trope seems the most salient: the emphasis on the explosive expression of repressed female rage evidenced in the original Ginger Snaps can even claim to have re-written the rules of what the contemporary horror film can offer women. In particular, the film"s conflation of menstruation with monstrosity has lead many reviewers to argue that Ginger Snaps contains feminist and even lesbian subtexts (Nielsen, 2004;Briefel, 2005). But the theme of Canadian identity seems to be regarded important as well. ...
I think it is definitely possible to make feminist horror movies and I think we have proven that with all three Ginger Snaps films. (Paula Devonshire, producer of Ginger Snaps: Unleashed and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning)
... Yet, while Psycho represents a division between victim (Marion Crane) and attacker (Norman Bates), in Carrie the 'monster and victim converge' (Lindsey 1996, p. 282) on the same body. The implication is that uncontrolled monstrosity lurks beneath Carrie's adolescent body (see also Briefel 2005). 14. ...
This paper aims to develop the already extensive writing on female bodybuilding by speculating on the ‘possible’ eroticism of the hyper-muscular female body. Most of the existing academic literature on female bodybuilding has either praised the built female body as feminist resistance to traditional ideas of femininity or else dismissed it as a strange form of erotic spectacle. Indeed, one of the fastest growing forms of erotic representation is the newly christened form of sexual fetishism termed ‘muscle-worship’ which has only recently reached public awareness through the new found availability of videos/DVDs and, most importantly, the Internet. This paper seeks to problematize readings of female bodybuilding which view it simply as feminist resistance or erotic spectacle. It argues that interpreting the image of the hyper-muscular female body is dependent upon its context and how it is coded within the representation. While mainstream bodybuilding representations attempt to create a sense of erotic numbness, asking the spectator to appraise the body like living sculpture, muscle-worship erotica contextualizes and eroticizes the body in a very different way.
... For many critics writing around the time of the films" releases, the gender trope seems the most salient: the emphasis on the explosive expression of repressed female rage evidenced in the original Ginger Snaps can even claim to have re-written the rules of what the contemporary horror film can offer women. In particular, the film"s conflation of menstruation with monstrosity has lead many reviewers to argue that Ginger Snaps contains feminist and even lesbian subtexts (Nielsen, 2004;Briefel, 2005). But the theme of Canadian identity seems to be regarded important as well. ...
How quick can a scary movie establish a devoted fan following that turns a desired cinematic object into a contemporary cult classic? Pretty quickly, judging by the reception trajectory of Ginger Snaps. Less than five years after the release of the first of the off-beat Canadian low budget horror gems, Ginger Snaps (Fawcett 2000), and hardly a year after the sequel and prequel, Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed (Sullivan, 2004) and Ginger Snaps III: Ginger Snaps Back (Harvey, 2004), the series has become a b-movie buzz word for horror reviewers and fan communities alike. Critics have been quick to note the cycle‟s a-typical traits, claiming that the films focus on two teen sisters fighting off fur lined infection represents a “genre busting sensation” (Vatnsdal, 2004: 216), that extends horror mythologies to a new range of viewing groups.
Souvent invisibilisées dans les médias et associées à des connotations négatives, les menstruations sont pourtant représentées dans certaines œuvres contemporaines qui cherchent à les normaliser et à les montrer de manière positive. S’appuyant sur vingt films et séries occidentaux et en adoptant une approche interdisciplinaire englobant anthropologie, études cinématographiques et de genre, cet article se propose d’analyser ces représentations. Il souligne spécifiquement comment les deux moments de transition que sont la ménarche et la ménopause sont présentés au XXIe siècle dans les récits audiovisuels et comment ces derniers offrent des représentations novatrices de leur ritualisation tout en remettant en question les imaginaires sociaux liés aux âges de la vie.
Since the birth of the genre, American horror filmmakers have posed female characters as prey and objects of sexual desire. Adolescent women in particular act as both the victim and as eye candy for viewers. From the damsel in distress to the rape victim seeking revenge, women in horror films exist to be antagonized, and so often, their exhibition of femininity and sexuality determines the severity of their suffering. Moreover, though the popular horror film narrative tends to explore the fringes of human nature, few horror films openly deal with the fears and concerns of women outside of threats to their physical being. In the past decade, the horror genre has produced a new crop of young female characters who challenge the tropes of traditional horror films by trading in their role of damsel in distress for the role of the antagonist and anti-hero. What’s more, these films deal with themes relevant to young women, such as body image issues, tumultuous relationships, and sexual repression. In this thesis, I analyze the popular American horror film Jennifer’s Body (2009), which features two violent female protagonists and explores the horrors of adolescent female friendships. In my analysis, I examine whether or not the re-imagined female characters in this film are a progressive reconstruction of gender, and identify ideological conventions of the horror genre that continue to denigrate femininity and female sexuality.
While some research has focused on menstrual sex, little work has centered the menstrual sex experiences of queer women and queer individuals assigned female at birth (AFAB) who do not identify as women. This study drew from qualitative data collected in 2019–2020 from 26 women and AFAB individuals (mean age = 30.2 years) throughout the U.S. Midwest to explore how queer women and queer AFAB individuals who do not identify as women talked about their experiences with having sex during their periods (“period sex”). Using feminist phenomenological thematic analysis, we identified six themes for how participants discussed period sex: (1) entitlement to and enjoyment about period sex; (2) period sex feels different physically; (3) efforts to minimize shame and discomfort with period sex; (4) looking for partner cues to determine feelings about period sex; (5) period sex as messy and “unsexy”; and (6) embracing vaginal sex but not cunnilingus while menstruating. Implications for understanding intrapsychic, relational, and sociocultural aspects of menstrual sex were explored, as were patterns of accommodating stigma compared to resisting stigma when reflecting on meanings of menstruation, sexuality, eroticism, queer identity, and relationships. Tensions between enacting resistance during period sex, and subscribing to heteronormative and patriarchal notions of period sex as “gross” were explored.
Ari Aster’s 2019 postmodern horror film Midsommar reflects current cultural preoccupations with globalization and American empire building in the twenty-first century United States. Mapping the film’s ideological attributes (including femininity/masculinity, academic knowledge/folk knowledge, and capitalism/communism—the strict binaries of which set false expectations for all other binaries to hold) onto its physical locations makes clear two prominent ideological spaces: the perverse urban and the idealized pastoral, which appear not only in Midsommar but in many horror films to which this chart can be applied. The horror of the film is driven by the objectified Other’s resistance to the imperial power’s desire to dominate physical place and own ideological space, but is complicated by a suggestion that, in this unique case, the Other is also a nationalist, right-wing power, and the tension between home and foreign reflects that of a new Cold War. The boundaries between spaces and places are disrupted, and our very inquiry into the structure of space is called into question.
Screen vampires define themselves through dominant or subliminal variations on the loss of, and desire for, fertility. Taking the gender-fluid figure of Dracula from Bram Stoker to the 2020 Netflix series as prototypical of traditional vampirism, it will be argued that while simulating youth, beauty and menstruation through biting and sucking, the Count defaults to a state of dehydrated infertility. As male-female shape-shifters, Dracula and the vampire more generally present as regressive constructs of the feminine. They return us to romantic ideals of the youth-desire equation, signifying both its ubiquity and the terror of its passing. As bodies unable to generate their own blood yet craving the bleeding of others, vampires harness the irrational fear of female ageing. They are, in effect, politically symbolic spectres of postmenopausal anxiety.
Horror has long been understood as a ‘bad object’ in relation to its audiences. More specifically, this presumed relationship is a gendered one, so that men are positioned as the genre’s natural audience, while women’s engagement with horror is presented as more fractious. However, those horror films framed as feminist require a reorientation of these relations. This article foregrounds the critical reception of a ‘conspicuously feminist’ horror film in order to explore what happens to the bad object of horror within an opinion economy that works to diagnose the feminism or its absence in popular culture. Reviews of Teeth (2007), a ‘feminist horror film’ about vagina dentata, illustrate the push and pull of gendered power attached to feminist media, where empowerment is often understood in binary terms in relation to its gendered audiences. The assumed disempowerment of male audiences takes precedence in many reviews, while other narratives emerge in which Teeth becomes an educational tool that might change gendered behaviours, which directly empowers female audiences or which dupes women into believing they have been empowered. Finally, Teeth ’s reviews expose a language of desire and fantasy around vagina dentata as an automated solution to the embodied experiences of women in contemporary culture. Teeth ’s reviews, I argue, offer a valuable case study for interrogating the tensions in discourse when the bad object of horror is put to work for feminism.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch is a character who has been reimagined across multiple media platforms for several decades, most recently in the horror-inspired Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. In this article I examine the way that Sabrina has evolved from a bubbly blonde comic character to a gothic representation of feminist resistance who challenges the status quo of both the magical and mortal worlds that she inhabits. I discuss how the series creates a dialogue with shows, films, political movements and events in contemporary culture to place itself within an established teen discourse relating to the liminality of the female teen experience.
Because negative views of menstruation are ubiquitous throughout the world, women’s distinctly positive and negative experiences with menstruation are rarely distinguished from each other. Semi-structured interviews with 20 women from a diverse (race, class, sexual orientation) community sample in a large Southwestern U.S. city were analyzed from a social constructionist perspective in order to examine women’s positive and negative experiences with menstruation. Three themes in women’s positive menstrual experiences were identified: (1) Evidence of not being pregnant; (2) Body as normal/intuitive; (3) Menstruation as tolerable. Four themes in women’s negative menstrual experiences were identified: (1) Fear of heavy bleeding; (2) Embarrassment about bleeding through; (3) Physical pain; and (4) Menstruation as always bad. Most women could not elicit a single positive anecdote about menstruation, but their descriptions of negative aspects of menstruation included abundant details about feeling negatively evaluated by others, particularly men. Implications for how physical symptoms of menstruation often mask negative emotions about menstruation are discussed, along with ways that women can embrace “menstrual crankiness” alongside higher positive framings of menstruation.
The centrality of the family and of the house as the space of domesticity in the Anglo-American bourgeois patriarchy has led to the proliferation of the haunted house narrative in various media. American Horror Story: The Murder House, a highly popular horror television series broadcast on FX in 2011, is one of the most successful examples among contemporary texts. Its success is partly due to the narrative specificity of the television series, which is characterized by the excess and repetition. This article argues that American Horror Story fully utilizes these characteristics to subvert the conventions of the traditional haunted house narratives, where a family experiences the transformation of their ideal home to a place of nightmare. Through the narrative where a significant number of characters in different generations are repeatedly destroyed by their own or others’ desires to establish or maintain an ideal home and family, American Horror Story critiques the destructiveness of the patriarchal family ideology and dismantles the culturally assumed belief in the heteronormative family as the foundation of safety and individual happiness.
The femme fatale occupies a precarious yet highly visible space in contemporary cinema. From sci-fi alien women to teenage bad girls, filmmakers continue to draw on the notion of the sexy deadly woman in ways which traverse boundaries of genre and narrative. This book charts the articulations of the femme fatale in American cinema of the past twenty years, and contends that, despite her problematic relationship with feminism, she offers a vital means for reading the connections between mainstream cinema and representations of female agency. The films discussed raise questions about the limits and potential of positioning women who meet highly normative standards of beauty as powerful icons of female agency. They point towards the constant shifting between patriarchal appropriation and feminist recuperation that inevitably accompanies such representations within mainstream media contexts.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” the American wilderness is depicted as a dangerous, menacing space with the potential of leading even the most faithful into the service of the devil:
The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds; the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while, sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn.1
A little more than a century later, Frank Capra made a film in which an idealistic young politician heads to Washington, DC, to mount a seemingly impossible battle against corrupt politicians who sought to build a dam at the site promised for a national boys’ camp. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) presents the summer camp as an institution that epitomizes the American experience. Sometime over the course of the century, a drastic shift in American attitudes toward wild areas had occurred.
When I teach a course called “Gender, Bodies, and Health,” designed to explore topics that include everything from pregnancy and domestic violence to orgasm and food politics, nothing provokes more disgust, hostility, and discomfort than the week on menstruation. Male students have left the class on the first day when I merely mention that we will study menstruation in the second week; women often gaze uncomfort- ably down at the syllabus and have later characterized menstruation as a topic they do not discuss. Certainly, the panics that surround men- struation have long rendered the menstruating body shameful, taboo, silent, and even pathological. From the historic separation of women’s menstruating bodies into “menstrual huts” (Guterman, Mehta, and Gibbs 2008) to the pervasive insistence upon the (pre)menstruating body as disordered (for example, PMDD, accusations of women “on the rag” when they express anger, etc.), women have had to confront their internalized body shame and cultural expectations for the absence of menstruation for some time.
In her influential 1992 study of American horror films, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover observes that, while studies have been made of Alfred Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward his female characters, no such study has been made of Brian De Palmas.1 Certainly, however, a critical consensus on the misogynistic sensibility of this still-active director (his latest films being Redacted, his multimedia 2007 film about the current Iraq War, and his 2006 adaptation of James Ellroy’s 1987 noir novel The Black Dahlia ) would appear to have been reached. In an essay on Carrie (De Palma, 1976), Shelley Stamp Lindsey excoriates the director for his demonization of Carrie’s emergent female sexuality: “Carrie presents a masculine fantasy in which the feminine is constituted as horrific … the film presents female sexuality as monstrous and constructs femininity as a subject position impossible to occupy.”2 Abigail Lynn Coykendall offered a more nuanced and complex but, ultimately, incoherent reading of Carrie, one that makes the fatal critical error of collapsing the film’s sensibility with that of its source material. In an important essay on masochism in the monster film, Aviva Briefel encouragingly challenges Lindsey’s schematic reading but essentially draws the same general conclusions about the significance of the film.3
The theme of this book has been that transport decisions taken on the single criterion of profitability will be seriously deficient. The reasons for this are (1) that the transport sector is subject to major indivisibilities, joint costs and economies of scale which mean that marginal private cost may often be well below average, and (2) that transport systems are major creators of externalities, which are not taken into account by individuals in their market behaviour.
A Nightmare on Elm Street. Halloween. Night of the Living Dead. These films have been indelibly stamped on moviegoers' psyches and are now considered seminal works of horror. Guiding readers along the twisted paths between audience, auteur, and cultural history, author Kendall R. Phillips reveals the macabre visions of these films' directors in Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film. Phillips begins by analyzing the works of George Romero, focusing on how the body is used cinematically to reflect the duality between society and chaos, concluding that the unconstrained bodies of the Living Dead films act as a critical intervention into social norms. Phillips then explores the shadowy worlds of director Wes Craven. In his study of the films The Serpent and the Rainbow, Deadly Friend, Swamp Thing, Red Eye, and Shocker, Phillips reveals Craven's vision of technology as inherently dangerous in its ability to cross the gossamer thresholds of the gothic. Finally, the volume traverses the desolate frontiers of iconic director John Carpenter. Through an exploration of such works as Halloween, The Fog, and In the Mouth of Madness, Phillips delves into the director's representations of boundaries-and the haunting consequences for those who cross them. The first volume ever to address these three artists together, Dark Directions is a spine-tingling and thought-provoking study of the horror genre. In analyzing the individual works of Romero, Craven, and Carpenter, Phillips illuminates some of the darkest minds in horror cinema.
In recent years the 'body' has become one of the most popular areas of study in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Transgressive Bodies engages with these contemporary cultural debates to offer an examination of a variety of non-normative bodies and how they are represented in film, media and popular culture. It will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines, including the media, film, culture and gender studies.
In Virgin Territory contributors consider virginity as it is produced and marketed in film. With chapters that span a range of periods, genres, and performances, this collection proves that although it seems like an obvious quality at first glance, virginity in film is anything but simple. The essays in Virgin Territory destabilize assumptions about virginity and connect moments of virginity in film to their larger social significance. Editor Tamar Jeffers McDonald has assembled a range of contributions by noted film scholars to consider virginity from numerous perspectives, including both the male and female quest to lose virginity, the role of virginity in horror film, issues of sexual agency and desire in both historic and contemporary depictions of virginity, and the complications of self-pleasure and masturbation. Films considered include classics of the Production Code era, like Marjorie Morningstar, Pillow Talk, and Bonjour Tristesse, as well as more recent films like Porky's, Losin' It, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Pie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Scary Movie. Contributors also consider particular stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day to investigate the positioning of virginity on an actor's physical body. Across different eras and genres, different films have different methods of representing virginity, relying on costume, mise-en-scène, and performance to convey the virgin status, while some film stars are associated with the quality to both the furtherance, and the frustration, of their careers. Virgin Territory explores the contrasts and continuities in films' attempts at representing this internal state to fascinating effect. Scholars of film and television history as well as cultural studies will enjoy this significant volume.
When Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964, Bryan Forbes) was set for release, cinema managers were advised that feminine appeal was a strong angle for publicity, and the film went on to be a critical and commercial success. Yet, it is relatively unknown in existing academic histories of horror cinema. The female lead, spiritualist premise and psychological horror make it an uneasy bedfellow with existing accounts of 1960s British horror films, which focus on the sexualised colour-saturated violence of Hammer Studios and its associated offspring. This article reverses this trend by revealing a cycle of 1960s black-and-white British horror films whose primary textual address is to women, manifested through complex female characters, interiority and stories of motherhood, stillbirth and child murder. Utilising Mary Ann Doane's work on maternal melodrama, the article explores the parallels between this cycle and the woman's film, and draws upon reception analysis in order to consider how the critics responded to the female-centred films. It is suggested that not only have film historians failed to note that this cycle exists, but more importantly they have also failed to understand how frightening the films could be for a female audience.
Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film’s central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic Torture Porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here – where adolescent males become "men" by enacting sexual violence – are as problematic as the spectre of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film’s gender conflicts.
Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) may have featured both animated corpses and hardcore sex scenes, but only recently have Re-Penetrator (2004) and Porn of the Dead (2006) managed to fully eroticise the living dead, allowing these creatures to engage in intercourse. In doing so, the usually a-subjective zombie is allotted a key facet of identity - sexuality. This development within the sub-genre needs accounting for outside of the contexts of porn studies, where it has only been briefly touched upon in relation to its "extremity". Moreover, the gendering of the undead opens a discussion which expand the horizons of zombie studies away from the overt critiques of capitalism, race and psychoanalysis that have pervaded analyses of these narratives. The dichotomy of binary oppositions so often associated with psychoanalytic approaches dictates that "passive (non-phallic) = female", and "active (phallic) = male". In these terms, the zombies are feminine - soft-bodied and passive, despite their murderous intent (which has been accounted for, by Barabara Creed (1993) amongst others, by invoking the vagina-dentata motif). Humans (active) are deemed masculine, not least since they tend to dispatch zombies with "phallic guns". Taking this logic to an extreme, the zombie may be read as allegorising feminism: the "feminised" figures (zombies) become fearsome in their will to exert themselves despite their seeming disempowerment in the face of "masculine" hegemony. Ultimately, by grouping together as a force, they overthrow or at least significantly damage that "normality" (an ideological paradigm usually read in terms of race, class and economics).
While much research has addressed negativity surrounding women’s menstruation, surprisingly little research has interrogated the relationship between menstruation and sexuality. This study used inductive thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with 40 women across a range of age, race and sexual orientation backgrounds to examine women’s experiences with sex during menstruation. Results showed that, while 25 women described negative reactions — and two described neutral reactions — 13 women described positive reactions to menstrual sex. Negative responses cohered around four themes: women’s discomfort and physical labor to clean ‘messes’, overt partner discomfort, negative self-perception and emotional labor to manage partner’s disgust. Positive responses cohered around two themes: physical and emotional pleasure from sex while menstruating, and rebellion against anti-menstrual attitudes. Notable race and sexual identity differences appeared, as white women and bisexual or lesbian-identified women described positive feelings about menstrual sex more than women of color or heterosexual women. Bisexual women with male partners described more positive reactions to menstrual sex than did heterosexual women with male partners, implying that heterosexual identity related to negative menstrual sex attitudes more than heterosexual behavior. Those with positive menstrual sex attitudes also enjoyed masturbation more than others. Implications for sexual identity and racial identity informing body practices, partner choice affecting women’s body affirmation, and women’s resistance against common cultural ideas about women’s bodies as ‘disgusting’ were addressed.
“Nightmares of the Past”
Other variations occur which relate to questions of time. The trait of inversion may either date back to the very beginning, as far back as the subject’s memory reaches, or it may not have become noticeable till some particular time before or after puberty.
films about men who turn into ravening wolves are ripe for an approach to the horror genre, pioneered by Robin Wood, that sees the films staging a return of the repressed, eruptions (in the case of werewolf films) of primal carnality that must be contained and eradicated before the societal status quo can be restored and reaffirmed (Wood 7–22). Werewolf films can be construed as dramas about men regressing, but also as ones about young men moving forward. Walter Evans sees films about individuals caught up by powerful urges they can neither understand nor control, and wracked by bodily transformations that include hair growing in unexpected places, telling stories about the traumas and discoveries of adolescence (54–55). This second interpretive template can be fitted to many entries in the subgenre, perhaps none more snugly than I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). Evans focuses on The Wolf Man (1941), with its affable and pitiable protagonist, Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), writing that “the monsters are generally sympathetic, in large part because . . . they themselves suffer the change as unwilling victims” (55). Another unwilling victim of his own sexual awakening, I argue in this article, is the central character in Werewolf of London (1935). Universal’s first attempt at a werewolf film has not been construed as a “coming of age” story for, perhaps, a couple of reasons: its protagonist has been widely regarded as unsympathetic, and the confusions and terrors of adolescence implicitly dramatized by the film are those, specifically, of a gay man.1 This dawning is all the more convulsive because it is a second adolescence, and so this film depicts, simultaneously, a moving forward and a going back, with the latter sense calling to mind the genre’s relationship to the repressed and its return.
That the film has a gay subtext seems to me, although very few have written about it, obvious.2 Perhaps this overtness is one reason it is hard to find an extended queer reading of this film; it may seem that there is little work of interpretation to do when so much lies on the surface. An online reviewer of Werewolf of London (hereafter WWL) calls this subtext “almost impossible to ignore” (Erickson). One starts to get a sense of the film’s obsessive thematic preoccupations from even a thumbnail sketch of the story, which opens with botanist Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) hiking in Tibet in search of a rare flower, the Mariphasa lupino lumino, and finding it just before he is attacked and bitten by a werewolf. Glendon returns home to England and meets another botanist, Doctor Yogami (Warner Oland), who, Glendon learns, is the one who bit him in wolf form back in Tibet. Yogami warns Glendon that both of them are now infected, and he implores Glendon to share his specimen of the rare plant, the flower of which contains the only known antidote to werewolfism. Glendon refuses, transforms, kills, and ultimately is shot dead. Along the way, he and Yogami, bound by their terrible secret, vie and tussle for possession of a flower that Harry Benshoff has called “the key signifier of the homoerotic male couple’s lycanthropy in Werewolf of London” (47).
Beyond its bare narrative outlines, the film supplies ample encouragement for viewers to construe the two men’s secret to be that they are only superficially werewolves and actually lovers. There is Glendon’s relationship with his wife, Lisa (Valerie Hobson), which from the outset seems troubled and distant, nothing like the intense chemistry he and Yogami share from their first scene of dialogue together (Photo 1). One could also point to the suggestive staging of Glendon’s attack on Paul (Lester Matthews), Lisa’s childhood sweetheart (Photo 2), and to other moments in a...
Body horror, a genre trope that showcases often graphic violations of the human body, is also justifiably called biological horror. The true biological nature of the horror elicited by these films is here discussed in light of hybrids, metamorphoses, mutations, aberrant sex, and zombification.
In this essay, I explore the radical reframing of the traditional werewolf narrative with respect to the figure of the double and the abject female body in the Ginger Snaps werewolf trilogy. Notable theorists discussed herein include Barbara Creed, Carol Clover, Julia Kristeva, April Miller and Robin Wood. Throughout both its folkloric and cinematic history, the creature of the werewolf has been constructed almost invariably as a male monster suffering within a Jekyll and Hyde-like narrative of the double. An otherwise exemplary member of Robin Wood's society of surplus repression, the male lycanthrope is doomed to endure a monthly transformation into monstrous, murderous beast, the Other that challenges normality through its very existence. The agony of the male werewolf, therefore, is generally believed to exist only with regard to the regret he feels for the previous night's violent excesses. However, it is actually the male lycanthrope's bodily alignment with the female Other that causes his distress. Forced to confront an abject body tied to a monthly lunar cycle, the male werewolf is feminized. Not only does the sufferer's body not respect the boundary between human and animal, but the tentative boundary between male and female is also violated, and it is this transgression that accounts for the true agony of the classic male werewolf. The Ginger Snaps werewolf cycle challenges this narrative by situating lycanthropy within the lives of female teenagers Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald. Following the subgenre's typical trajectory, Ginger is bitten by a werewolf, thus becoming a werewolf herself, and her younger sister, Brigitte, attempts to save her. However, by transmuting the werewolf narrative from the male to the female, the implications of the doppelganger narrative must change. By virtue of her abject female body, Ginger is already marginalized and constructed as Other in the suburban world in which she lives. There is no monstrous double for Ginger, for as a menstruating female she has always been this monster. As a result, Ginger eventually embraces her lycanthropy and in doing so also embraces her identity as a woman. She becomes the "goddamn force of nature" of her teenage dreams, and unlike the male werewolf, whose monstrosity is a nightmarish shadow of his own normality, Ginger's monstrosity is her own reflection, an unwavering look at a fantastic self otherwise unattainable to her in the world she lives. Yet Ginger Snaps is still a doppelganger narrative. It is Brigitte who suffers under the agony of Ginger's transformation, for in losing Ginger, Brigitte loses her identity as well. Brigitte longs for the reconciliation of her and her sister, but as the two have become two distinct persons in Ginger's monstrosity, this is impossible. Coded as Carol Clover's Final Girl figure, Brigitte destroys her sister, thereby coming to stand for the symbolic order she resists so enthusiastically at the start of the film. However, despite their radically different engagements with monstrosity, both Ginger and Brigitte are punished. It appears that as subversive as the Ginger Snaps films are in respect to the werewolf narrative, they also reflect a deep cultural ambivalence about female identity. It is only together that the girls can triumph, making the Ginger Snaps cycle a powerful statement on the power of relationality between females in the construction and maintenance of self.
Masculinity and the Horror Film
- Peter Hutchings
Peter Hutchings, "Masculinity and the Horror Film," in
You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies, and Men, eds. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thurmin (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1993), 84-94.
Freud also refused the possibility of primary masochism in his 1919 essay
- Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,
trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books,
1962), 24. Freud also refused the possibility of primary
masochism in his 1919 essay, "A Child Is Being Beaten."
Freud later acknowledged a primary form of masochism in "The Economic Problem of Masochism
- Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and
ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 66. Freud
later acknowledged a primary form of masochism in "The
Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924).
Alain Silver refer to the film as "a love story of operatic dimensions masquerading as a monster flick
- Linda Brookover
Linda Brookover and Alain Silver refer to the film as "a
love story of operatic dimensions masquerading as a monster flick," in "What Rough Beast?: Insect Politics and
The Fly," in Horror Film Reader eds. Alain Silver and
James Ursini (New York: Limelight, 2000), 237.
Robbins also remarks on the similarities between the teleporter and the film camera in "'More Human Than I Am Alone': Womb Envy in David Cronenberg's The Fly and Dead Ringers
- W Helen
Helen W. Robbins also remarks on the similarities
between the teleporter and the film camera in "'More
Human Than I Am Alone': Womb Envy in David Cronenberg's The Fly and Dead Ringers," in Screening the Male:
Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds.
Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge,
1993), 145.
The Metamorphosis of The Fly
- Adam Knee
Adam Knee, "The Metamorphosis of The Fly," Wide
Angle vol. 14, no. 1 (1992): 24.